THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
NOVEMBER 1972
After a week at the Grange, Pru’s activities fell into a steady rhythm.
Whatever apprehension she first felt about waking up with a ninety-year-old woman in her bed, to speak nothing of the accompanying milky old-lady smell, she soon got over. Or she ignored for the sake of her ongoing employment. Pru had nowhere else to go.
Though she grew accustomed to the pattern of her days, the nights were another matter. Unexpected bedmates notwithstanding, Pru struggled to sleep, mostly because of the voices. Real or imagined, in her head or in the home, muffled conversations disrupted any hope of peace.
The darkness brought with it the sound of a male, sometimes a woman, and it happened nearly every night. Pru mentioned it once, to Mrs. Spencer’s vast hilarity. Perhaps the bed reserved at the O’Connell Ward should go to Pru instead, she guffawed. Although, every once in a while, Mrs. Spencer would ascribe the voices to Tom.
Come dawn, Pru didn’t have time to ponder the disturbances on account of the fifty or so spaniels she tended to daily. She fed the dogs, tidied their messes, groomed them, and then mopped up ever more messes due to their very efficient digestive tracks. With no less than twelve bitches and an unending parade of newly born pups, there wasn’t a hairless speck of real estate in the whole bloody place.
“Miss Valentine!” Mrs. Spencer would call out. “Reina. Have you seen Reina? No one sets foot off this property until we find Reina.”
Better finding Reina than serving midwife to Princess. Pru had seen enough puppy births to know she didn’t want to see more of them. Not that she had a choice.
Alas, despite the amount of time she spent with them, Pru couldn’t distinguish Reina from Arthur from Bixby from fuck-all. The dogs all looked the same to her, male or female, from this litter or from that.
But Pru played the game. She’d roam the yard aimlessly looking for Reina, with a solemn face of purpose but accomplishing nothing. Mrs. Spencer always found the missing pooch, in the end.
And then there were the cats. All of those cats. Twenty-five? A hundred? They were too bountiful to estimate. The cats were the reason for the unplugged refrigerator, as it turned out. Whenever a feline met its demise, Mrs. Spencer stored it in the icebox to be dealt with later. Of course, later never came.
The work was dull, but constant, Pru’s hours mostly packed. When she had a spare moment, Pru meandered into town to grab a bite of something perishable, a treat she couldn’t enjoy at home thanks to the cat-in-the-icebox arrangement. For her part, Mrs. Spencer ate minimally, which matched up with her gaunt frame well enough.
Charlie would’ve been horrified to see his fiancée reduced to such circumstances, but Pru didn’t mind all that much. More puppies nipping at her legs meant less time thinking of Charlie, dusty and alone in the family mausoleum. Where did he die first? she often wondered. Was it in his head, or at his heart?
And Mrs. Spencer had a knack for detecting when her employee’s mind began to stray. The second she noticed Pru was not fully engaged with the task at hand, Mrs. Spencer dialed up a ribald Parisian tale or yet another reference to the barn man Tom.
“Did I tell you about the time he kidnapped those German POWs for me?” Mrs. Spencer asked one afternoon while they waited for a dog to finish laboring.
“Kidnapped? Why, Mrs. Spencer? Banbury too short on men for you?”
“Very funny, Miss Valentine. No, my apple trees required pruning and Tom is afraid of heights.”
“And you desperately needed your trees cut back?” Pru said. “In the middle of a war?”
“It was 1945 thus hardly the middle. Regardless, Tom showed up with two Krauts and they got to it straightaway. The men were knowledgeable, quick, and well behaved. Those are the Germans for you. Oh look! Here comes the first puppy of the litter!”
Mrs. Spencer was not the only individual who liked to raise the topic of Tom. Locals were also keen to discuss the man, though they didn’t know what to make of him either.
It was universally agreed upon that Tom had lived among them at one time but fell into a black hole of existence around 1953. One person seemed to recall the German POW story, but couldn’t be sure.
“Have you seen him?” they all asked.
“Have you found the body?”
“There must be a body.”
“How about bones?”
“A mummified corpse?”
Pru didn’t fault them for their macabre assumptions. Who hadn’t seen the movie Psycho? Possessed by a dead mother, or a dead landscaper, it was all the same. Plus Mrs. Spencer was considered a bit of a psycho herself, given her propensity to tear through town shouting obscenities and threatening peoples’ lives.
“You speak to me that way again, Mr. Haverford, and you’d better check for a bomb beneath the hood of your precious lorry!”
“It’s Harris, not Haverford. And I’m a missus, not a mister!”
“Car bomb, old man! Beware the car bomb!”
“I don’t mean it,” Mrs. Spencer would insist later, at home, by the stove. “Some people like to hunt. This is my sport.”
After only a few weeks, Pru had several dozen stories like these to tell.
Was she afraid of the old woman? Perhaps. But a month in, Pru had sustained no serious injuries, physical or otherwise. Even the verbal insults did not much sting. The most threatening aspects to life at the Grange were the partially collapsed ceilings and gaping holes in the floors.
“Don’t worry, Charlie,” Pru would say to the night sky. “Guns? Rumored dead bodies? That’s nothing. It’ll be rotted wood that does me in.”
In the end, Pru decided tales of Tom were nothing more than village scuttlebutt. And the voices she heard were probably the adolescent boys who skulked around the property, using slingshots to hurl pebbles and other projectiles through the windows. Pru herself had been beamed in the head with a turnip.
Plus it was in Mrs. Spencer’s very nature to play up rumors of the man. The woman knew full well the townsfolk longed for a gothic tale. Everyone loved a ghost story and so she gave them one. There’d probably never been a Tom at all. It’s what Pru told herself anyhow. She had to find some comfort, enough to allow for a little rest.